Flanders

Screening: Monday 22 June, 6:30pm

Bruno Dumont | France | 2006 | R16 violence, sexual violence, offensive language

Life is brutal in the cinema of Bruno Dumont. His view of stunted existence in the rural north of France has a muscular eloquence that can be mighty persuasive. The characters in his Life of Jesus and Humanity are framed by the sombre beauty of their landscape, but they toil and rut and kill with the stolid determination of beasts. So too in Flanders, which won him the Grand Prix in 2006.

It is an account of two young farmworkers who sign up for a war somewhere unspecified in the Middle East. It’s also the story of the young woman they leave behind in Dumont’s native Flanders, itself the scene of massive slaughter in World War I. — Bill Gosden

It’s an extraordinary and raw piece of work. There is scant dialogue. There is no obvious centre. The film leans over farmyard gates as carelessly as it does the desert trenches of North Africa and Afghanistan. The intensity is almost unbearable. Yet this film is also a parable about rural France, shot with so much realism that it bleeds.

The girlfriends are underage, unfussy and keen to mate in the mud... The young men who long for war are brutalised beyond belief. The Spartan savagery of the story makes words superfluous. These are soldiers (boys) who are, as often as not, killed by children. They rape and murder without thinking. They are captured and brutalised in kind. These performances, by amateur actors, are far beyond humbling. Dumont is one of those rare directors who knows what it means to shoot the unspeakable truth. — James Christopher, The Times

(91 minutes, In French with English subtitles, DVD)

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